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Multiple moments of truth
By Tomer Zarchin
Tags: Menachem Mazuz, Israel News 

I was lucky, says Attorney General Menachem Mazuz, in summing up his five years on the job. His name is associated with some of the most important legal events of recent years: the decision to close the "Greek Island" case against prime minister Ariel Sharon, the failure (so far) to convict former president Moshe Katsav of sex crimes, Minister Haim Ramon's trial over an unsolicited kiss, a long list of convictions against Knesset members and ministers - and the crowning achievement: the indictment against an incumbent prime minister, Ehud Olmert, in the Rishon Tours double-billing case.

Officially, Mazuz's term is due to end in February 2010, but lately there have been rumors in the legal establishment that he'll announce his resignation in the coming months. I didn't promise myself or others that I would serve a full term, he often says. He still works from morning till night, but the abundance of cases sparking particular public interest, and the criticism hurled at him from various directions, have taken their toll: Mazuz is getting weary. But now, toward the end of his tenure, he is arriving at some of the most significant moments of reckoning in his career: He must decide how to proceed with the Katsav case and whether to also try Prime Minister Olmert in the case of the cash-stuffed envelopes he received from American businessman Moshe Talansky.

In addition to Olmert and Katsav, a partial inventory of public servants for whom he has already signed indictments includes Tzachi Hanegbi, Abraham Hirchson, Haim Ramon, Yehiel Hazan, Michael Gorlovsky, Omri Sharon, Naomi Blumenthal, Yair Peretz, Shlomo Benizri, Judges Osnat Alon-Laufer and Dahlia Mark-Horenczyk, and senior tax authority officials. He also issued a scathing public report against Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger, and headed 50 corruption investigations into different local authorities.
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This is an impressive output for someone who, at the start of his tenure, was perceived as a bureaucrat who became attorney general after slowly advancing through the corridors of the Justice Ministry, and who would be incapable of standing up to government pressure. His first significant decision - to close the case against former prime minister Sharon and his son Gilad in the Greek Island affair - only bolstered this image.

But today Mazuz rejects the criticism he receives, and likens himself to officials from the American Internal Revenue Service (IRS), who are all smiles and pleasantries until the moment they catch you lying. He's confident that each decision that he has made involved due consideration, and was appropriate at the time. He does not feel a need to atone for any missteps, because he doesn't think there were any - either in the Greek Island case or the Katsav case.

The Katsav case: Media meddling

In the public mind, the "Katsav case" has become the "Mazuz case." After issuing a very serious draft indictment that included a rape accusation against the former president, the attorney general ultimately settled for a toned-down plea agreement in which the most serious charge was commission of an obscene act. Katsav later withdrew his acceptance of the plea bargain, and the public has been waiting 8 months now for a new indictment. Mazuz is aware of the casual observer's sense of "discomfort" with the outcome thus far.

After Katsav reneged on the plea bargain, the case was transferred from the Jerusalem district attorney's office, where there were disagreements over the possibility of obtaining a conviction, to the central district attorney's office. The "loose ends" that still needed tying up have turned into an investigation unto themselves, and time is ticking away.

Mazuz feels certain that the correct decisions were made at each point in time, and that the result is not indicative of misguided conduct. He claims credit for bringing the case to the public's attention - after he ordered the launching of an investigation although he was under no obligation to do so - once Katsav informed him in July 2006 that he was being blackmailed by A., who worked in the President's Residence.

Mazuz directs his complaints at the media, who knew about the stories surrounding Katsav and kept quiet until the case exploded. Afterward, he contends, they went overboard by publishing testimonies and encouraging the public perception of a very serious case supported by an abundance of evidence, just waiting for the conviction to be signed. Mazuz maintains that the case ran into evidentiary difficulties from the start and that the media raised unrealistic expectations about it.

The attorney general is convinced that the decision to reach a plea bargain was correct, because it would have achieved the main objective: exposure, denunciation and conviction of a sex offender, even if certain charges were dropped.

But Katsav had other plans, and Mazuz will never forget his about-face at the Jerusalem Magistrate's Court in April, even though he's certain there was no trickery involved. Instead, the attorney general is totally frustrated by the petitions to the High Court against the plea bargain. He believes that if they hadn't been submitted, Katsav would have confessed and the case would have concluded with a resounding conviction. He thinks those who led the battle against the plea bargain caused more bad than good.

Attorney Barak Calev, director of legal affairs for the Movement for Quality Government in Israel, who was among the High Court petitioners, is not moved by Mazuz's argument.

"There was a serious lack of good judgment here," Calev explains. "Mazuz was just incapable of acknowledging the initial mistake of signing on to the plea bargain ... Instead of coming out with an alternative indictment that contained the most serious rape charges from the first draft indictment, the foot-dragging began. The case was overflowing with evidence, there were 10 women complainants. This is a very serious mishandling of a big public case."

Calev adds that Mazuz also exercised faulty judgment when he argued that there was a public interest in not harming the institution of the presidency, as opposed to a real interest in exposing the truth.

A leading attorney in the field of white-collar crime, who was not involved in the Katsav case, offered a caustic description of Mazuz's performance facing Katsav's three skilled lawyers, Avigdor Feldman, Zion Amir and Avi Lavie. "The street cats devoured the house cat," is how he put it.

Prof. Ariel Bendor of Bar-Ilan University's law school, who, together with attorney Eldad Yaniv, represented A. from the President's Residence, echoes the criticism of Mazuz, though he also finds some positive points: for instance, the fact that Mazuz changed his position after the Katsav hearing attests to an admirable sense of integrity, open-mindedness and flexibility.

Calev and Lavie second Bendor's appreciation of Mazuz as an honest and practical professional. Neither questioned the integrity of Mazuz's judgment at all, even if they did not agree with his decisions.

Targeting corruption

At a special session of the Knesset's State Control Committee on governmental corruption, Mazuz declared that: "No one in Israel is immune from investigation and standing trial for acts of corruption: not prime ministers, nor presidents, nor ministers, nor rabbis and judges. This is not self-evident, even in 'civilized' countries."

Since assuming his position, Mazuz has made a target of centers of corruption. One is based in the connection between elected officials and party central committee members, which he describes as "all you can grab." Another target involves political appointments. In the less serious cases, these are a kickback to supporters, a variation on political bribery. In more serious instances, the appointment is just a platform upon which complicated corruption offenses are committed, as occurred in the case of former minister Shlomo Benizri, who was convicted of appointing Yaakov Buchris as director general of the Employment Authority, in order to help one of Benizri's associates.

Mazuz sees the indictment against Hanegbi as having strategic importance - because it highlighted the use of political appointments as a method - and a deterrent effect: Ministers tell him that ever since the indictment was filed and he issued his directives, they've been getting fewer appeals from central committee members, and when they do get them, they have a good reason to turn them down.

The Tax Authority affair revealed another hub of corruption: Interested parties sought to influence the appointment of the head of the authority, and through that post, additional appointments in the system. In Mazuz's view, if this affair had not been exposed, within a few years the entire authority management would have been controlled by elements with outside interests. He defines this case as the most serious instance of corruption he has dealt with, and compares it to organized crime sinking its talons into government systems.

But Mazuz's fight against government corruption is perhaps best epitomized by his decision to file an indictment, pending a hearing, against Olmert in the Rishon Tours case. This is apparently only the first stage before a decision to put Olmert on trial in the Talansky case, too.

Mazuz rebuffs the criticism from Olmert's attorneys regarding his decision to split the Olmert cases and not rule on them as one entity. He feels that while a certain connection does exist between the cases, each one also stands on its own. What do they expect, wonders Mazuz - that we'll conclude a case now and then it will be stuck in a drawer until after the election? He understands that a merger of the cases would lead to an unlimited protraction of the legal process. In principle, he believes that the prosecution has an interest in merging cases, but "we also do not have the right to keep the decision in a vault."

Mazuz may have learned his lesson: Too many cases have been lying on his desk for too long. The Katsav case has already dragged on way beyond the bounds of public patience. In July, MK Avigdor Lieberman petitioned the High Court, complaining that the law enforcement system has been investigating him for more than eight years. Just this month, the decision was made to try former Shas MK Yair Peretz, for offenses related to the period he served in the Knesset, over seven years ago; and last month, the decision was made to file an indictment against Rehovot Mayor Shuki Forer, for an incident that occurred for the most part about eight years ago.

Calev maintains that the state is still not seriously tackling corruption. "You could say that the law-enforcement system in the Mazuz era is generally one step behind developments in breaches of ethics," he says, referring primarily to the goings-on in the local authorities. In his assessment, the system Mazuz heads has yet to grasp that corruption has become much more sophisticated and is approaching boundaries of legitimacy, such as in secret agreements made between elected officials, for example.

At the epicenter

Since the late Haim Cohen, Mazuz tends to say, there hasn't been an attorney general who came from within the system and knew it intimately. Still, in the beginning, he angered the State Prosecutor's Office, when he assailed former state prosecutor Edna Arbel and her staff for their recommendation to try Sharon in the Greek Island affair. His criticism was perceived as a professional expression of no-confidence in the system he himself headed, and then-justice minister Yosef Lapid was forced to come to the rescue and issue reassurances.

Looking back, Mazuz says that most of the statements attributed to him against Arbel were "95-percent media invention." He admits he had reservations about the handling of the Greek Island case, but insists there was no personal criticism. He did not ascribe fault to anyone in the State Prosecutor's Office, but thought that the case was generally not handled correctly.

But Mazuz has since stood at the epicenter of several more storms, perhaps due to a lack of awareness of the effect of statements that come from someone in his position. At the May 2004 Israel Bar Association convention, he said that he had a lot of understanding and sympathy for every conscientious objector, and that conscientious objection could be a positive phenomenon as an expression of social involvement, but he also emphasized the need for appropriate enforcement against objectors.

In August 2005, at a hearing of the Knesset's State Control Committee, Mazuz surprised attendees with the controversial statement that, "We need to be careful about positing a connection between this or that event and incitement. The assassination of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin is cited as an outgrowth of incitement, but to this day no one has proven that it was incitement that led to the Rabin murder."

Mazuz has also had to cope with a justice minister, Daniel Friedmann, who isn't making life easy for him. Prof. Bendor said this week that Mazuz should be admired for the way he has dealt with a justice minister who did not back him and preferred to clash with him. The battle between Mazuz and Friedmann heated up around the case of Deputy Prime Minister Haim Ramon, who was eventually convicted of forcibly committing an obscene act. Friedmann attacked the state prosecutor's handling of the case and called for it to engage in some serious soul-searching following Ramon's claims that the prosecutor and the police made inappropriate use of wiretapping, and did not provide a copy of the transcripts to Ramon - which might have changed the outcome of his trial.

Mazuz reacted sharply to Friedmann's suggestion to establish a government commission to examine the law-enforcement system's conduct in this affair. He viewed this as a war "on the home front" - on the law-enforcement institutions.

"There has never been anything like this," Mazuz wrote to the ministers in an unprecedented professional opinion against the acting justice minister. "For the first time in the history of the State of Israel, the government, a political body, is being asked to appoint a commission of inquiry to examine the conduct of the law-enforcement system, with regard to an investigation carried out against a senior minister, a close political partner of the prime minister."

Mazuz arrived at the government meeting on the proposal, and stood up to Friedmann. "He was very tough, even aggressive," Agriculture Minister Shalom Simhon recalled this week. "Mazuz was very forceful with Friedmann. Not crude, but he spoke with a lot of courage. It's not easy to stand up to your minister like that, in front of everyone. It made a big impression on me."

In July of this year, Friedmann presented a proposal to divide the authorities of the attorney general into "legal adviser to the government" and "chief prosecutor." He argued that the combination of jobs concentrates tremendous power in one position, and creates a built-in conflict of interests. At a conference held a month later at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mazuz unleashed some stinging criticism of the proposal, calling it "ludicrous" and part of a "campaign of vengeance" against the law-enforcement system, and declaring that its real aim was to undermine the position of the attorney general and empty it of all meaningful content.

Friedmann shot back, retorting that the current situation, in which the attorney general writes a ruling that cannot be appealed and essentially serves as a commander who is above the government is also ludicrous.

Mazuz vehemently opposed Friedmann's harsh criticism of the Supreme Court, the police and the state prosecutor, which has been described as a desire "to burn down the club." "The way it works here," says Mazuz, "is that things are smashed, and once they're smashed, there is no alternative mechanism. The damage entailed in hurting this institution exceeds any benefit."

Though he, too, is no fan of uninhibited High Court activism, he also thinks that there are areas where the court needs to demonstrate greater involvement, because it is a crucial institution in a democratic country.

While he still meets regularly with Friedmann, Mazuz will admit that in order to advance systemic goals, he needs the justice minister's assistance and support. Sometimes, what he finds is just the opposite. But on at least one occasion, he did side with Friedmann against the Supreme Court justices, when he ruled in September that the court's justices may also be selected when a transition government is in power. His independent position surprised Supreme Court President Dorit Beinisch, as well as Justices Ayala Procaccia and Edmund Levy, and members of the Judicial Selection Committee, who were relying on an opinion written by Mazuz himself in 2006 and on a High Court ruling.

Prof. Bendor, the son of retired Supreme Court justice Dalia Dorner, said this week that it takes a lot of guts to stand up to three Supreme Court justices and stake out a contrary position.

When asked about his plans for the future, Mazuz has not mentioned the Supreme Court as a goal. For now, he is focused on reaching decisions that will likely leave a mark on his entire career as attorney general.
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